Alex Lu

cramped and empty. My bones ached, but nothing could compare to the undeniable sensation of grief that I still had.

I left the hospital aware of every little thing.The precious plants that grew outside the hospital doors. The splintered wood on the doorpost. The scratch on the right bottom side of our car. I noticed how odd it was that I was alive. The feeling of life overwhelmed me. I noticed the look of anguish on my mothers face. The way her wrinkles seemed more evident, and the way her brows furrowed up together when she looked at me. I noticed how suicide was a permenant solution to something so temporary.

I see the way I’m changing. I recognize the way depression and I occasionally bump into one another. How we say our hello’s and quickly withdraw from old habits. I see the way anxiety and I shake hands, but my fingers don’t end up trembling. Insomnia and I, romantic partners that come to a solemn agreement each night. I see the way my medication beams with joy when I take it. I see the way emotions don’t control how I view the world, but I do. I see the way that my heart is being glued together piece by piece. I see the way my four walls look at me, and how they smile because they echo now more often with the sound of my laughter than with my sobs.

Fried Rice: The Flavors of My Childhood

Alex Lu

I close my eyes as the smell wafts through my nose, the pores of my skin, my mouth. The rich, heavenly aroma of fried rice permeates through the room. The first bite is pure bliss. Everything around me disappears into the moment, like a realization, an epiphany. The golden grains coated in oil and spices are fragrant jasmine. The taste soon fades and is replaced by the complexity of ingredients that creates a good fried rice. A touch of carrot, minced pork, onions. Then it blends together again, bound up by egg yolk, golden and ambrosial, like a food for the gods. The grains reveal their pleasant texture as they roll in my mouth and I chew, savoring the taste before gulping them down. All the implements are put to good use. Chopsticks gathering piles of rice from the top of the bowl, carefully arranged into a mountain of flavor. Spoons sifting deep within, dripping with oil and scent, umami rich. By the time I have finished the last bite, the smell has soaked through my hands, my whole body, warm and inviting. Long after the bowls are washed and dried, the fragrance still remains, elusive and powerful. Most of all, it is ubiquitous to any Chinese restaurant, every house.

Each bowl tells a story, the ingredients mixing together in new and different ways. It has been a story I have been told, and experienced time and time again. Since childhood I remembered the plates of steaming fried rice set before me by my parents. In my haste to capture its flavor and savor the grains, I would often burn my tongue. As I grew older, more varieties of food beckoned to me; soups, baked fish, nearly every type and form imaginable. I grew more patient, allowing each bite of the familiar rice to intermix with a whole table of rich piquancy. However, I have never forgotten my taste for fried rice, paramount among my favorites. I have tried pork and olive leaf, shrimp and corn, or even Chinese sausage and peas. Each pairing of ingredients is a new adventure for me, an experiment in flavor. Most of all, it is not only this or that. It is everything, combined in a way that makes it more than the sum of its different chapters. In each bowl I can see a little of me. The ingredients are simple, plain, mostly unhindered. The rice is white, a blank slate undrawn with the

letters of life, unaltered by sauces, flavors, or artificial colors. It is undrawn with the flavors of the world, gently steamed, releasing its own mild fragrance. It is the mind of an infant, ready to accept anything, everything, full of the promise of change. As the other ingredients are added in, the rice slowly changes to accommodate them, adapt, shift its grains to allow the others in. It is seeing a human mind at work, accommodating new ideas into the existing framework, adapting the multitude of neurons to make new connections, and shifting their new bonds, to be coated with spices, flavors, and ideology. Sometimes I can see myself in the bowls of fried rice I eat; each one a little different, to match the mood of each capricious, unique day. The basic ingredients, the rice, the oil, the salt, soy sauce, are unchanged. Maybe a touch of egg. Yet the things on top turn each bowl into its own unique personality, mirroring how our quirks turn us into humans.

There is a fried rice for each mood. When I have the time to languish, to enjoy the moments of silence between bites, the flavors are more sensitive and more nuanced, as if they are opening their hearts to me. There is time for everything to rest on my tongue just a moment longer, and to marinate. Each moment is more intimate, and it is like a private conversation between my taste buds and the spices on each shiny grain. When I am rushing to finish before the school day, the flavors are hasty, sketched in faint pastel. The taste is watered-down, a sleepy, slumbering version of its true self. I have only time to brush through the flavors once, before they fade into the early morning darkness. There is the fried rice for disappointment, and the flavors are muted gray, tears staining each grain with salt. Sometimes the rice tastes bitter, and it sits like lead, weighed down by my heaviness. And when I am caught in ecstatic excitement, the smoke and the fragrant air enhance each bite with an ethereal, effortless brilliance. Each emotion captures a different aspect of the rice, the flavors glowing from all angles through the prism of my thoughts.

I think that fried rice is a window into the soul, a mirror of the personality of the chef making it. In my mind’s eye I see my dad taking the cold rice out of the fridge, his hands nimbly chopping the onions, dried scallop, lamb, and breaking eggs into a bowl. His fried rice is rich, the scent almost overpowering, intensely flavorful and filled with different spices. It reflects his personality: somewhat overbearing, strong, driving forth with vigor.